Sunday, March 11, 2018

Finally, more light in the evenings again! I love the switch to daylight savings time, especially when it is accompanied by a gorgeous warm and sunny day! Despite the fact that I am still suffering from the aftereffects of a bad flu, I dragged myself out of the house and wandered down to Granville Island for a few hours later in the evening, carrying my X-Pro2 and Fujifilm's fantastic set of f/2 primes. Sunset was just after 7pm, and the warm colours and play of light and shadow was nice to experience.

After shooting with Fujifilm's new X-H1 on numerous occasions recently, as much as I really liked using that camera, there is still something about the X-Pro2 that just fits me better. The camera's controls are all readily available to my right hand, and I definitely prefer the offset, "rangefinder style" viewfinder too. That said, there are a bunch of things I really like about the X-H1 and I do hope that Fujifilm incorporates some of those firmware tweaks into an update for the X-Pro2 in the future! For my detailed preview of Fujifilm's X-H1, as well as an image gallery with lots of nighttime, slow shutter speed handheld exposures, taking advantage of the X-H1's new IBIS system, see the Beau Photo blog here...

Another note: all the images in the above gallery (and in the X-H1 gallery) were only processed in the very latest Adobe Lightroom CC. I have to say, Adobe has come a long way in the last year, improving their X-Trans sensor demosaic a fair bit. Images are rendering really nicely, with minimal colour bleed and better shadow details and texture than I recall. Sharp branches against a blue sky are nice and crisp, natural looking without blurriness or weird outlining.

The above images were processed with Adobe's "Camera ASTIA/SOFT" profile, which mimics Fujifilm's out-of-camera colour fairly well, much better than the "Adobe Standard" profile does. I have tweaked the profile even further myself, incorporating some slight hue and saturation adjustments to some colours, to bring it even closer to Fuji's colours, probably more like a lower contrast "Velvia" setting in all honestly. I find that Adobe's "Camera Velvia/VIVID" setting is just too hard and contrasty to use as a starting point. In any case, I am liking the overall colour rendition, and even how fine details look in low ISO images now, so Adobe finally deserves some praise on how it handles Fujifilm's X-Trans raw images. I will say this though: it's about time!

About Me

An avid landscape photographer and digital imaging specialist, Mike manages the digital imaging dept. at Beau Photo Supplies. His personal photography can be seen on his website at www.sublimephoto.com